I have two Plextor drives (a new PX-708A and an older PX-W1610). I'm wondering:

1. How do I get PlexTools? It didn't come with either drive and the Plextor site only seems to offer updates.

2. Is PlexTools (with my drives) a better choice for secure ripping than EAC?

I guess you aren't European, are you?



Edit: just noticed that Plextor USA offers PlexTools. This is news for me.

AFAIK, PlexTools only comes with European models. There are the updates on the website, but you have to have an older version installed to use them. You may be able to find a full version using Google, then download the latest update. Strange, because I had heard a while back that they would start to offer PT in the states (I assume you're in US). Might have something to do with US laws though.

As to whether it's better than EAC, in ripping speed definitely. I have used both. PlexTools does rip a LOT faster than EAC with my Plextor (PX-W2410A). In EAC secure mode, I get something averaging 8x, in PlexTools I have seen some rips approach 40x near the end of the CD. Supposedly, PlexTools takes full advantage of C2 error correction and can therefore read much quicker than EAC. EAC can read C2 also, but it seems to do something differently because ripping is much slower.

As to whether it's more or less accurate than EAC, I'd have to say they are equal. I havn't had problems with either after ripping a few hundred CD's over the last few months. I'm now mainly using EAC, but really only because I am encoding to FLAC and I can't do that directly with PT, yet. I hope one day they add user-defined command line encoders to PT.

PlexTools is bundled with Premium and PX-W5224A here in Japan. I assume it's bundled with both drives in the U.S. and other countries as well.

I'm in the US, which explains why I didn't receive PT with my drives. However, I found a registry hack that lets me install the PT 2.11 upgrade without a prior version.


That's great news. If PT is faster than EAC and just as accurate, I'll switch to PT. I've been using EAC in secure mode and getting speeds of 5-8X, so any improvement will be welcome, especially since I'm about to rip ~250 CDs.

Thanks to helpful folks in this forum I managed to install the latest version of PlexTools despite living in the US -- though I was born in Europe, so I think I'm entitled to a copy .

I'm amazed by how comphrenensive and fast it is. With EAC in Secure Mode I used to wait 10-15 minutes per CD (more if I used Test&Copy). With PT I can rip the same CD in 2-3 minutes.

Having finally decided to archive my CDs in WAV or AIFF, I was dreading the amount of time it would take to re-rip my collection using EAC, but now thanks to PT the task doesn't seem as daunting.

(I sound like a commercial, don't I?)

Now I just hope PT is really as accurate as EAC. With all the questions surrounding C2 accuracy (C2 is the basis of PT error detection if I'm not mistaken) I'm wondering if PT will really produce output as secure as EAC.

Since PT is so fast, I wonder if there is any value in effectively doing Test&Copy by hand (ie, ripping each CD twice in PT and doing a WAV compare)?

I'm also puzzled why PT speeds up as it extracts, starting at about 12x on the first track and reaching 40x by the end with my 708a.

Why would you not want to use a lossless compressor? like flac or ape.

This is one way you could do it:

Folder 1 = Rip 1

Folder 2 = Rip 2

Use an app like BFC found here to a binary file compare of two folders.

If you'd like more information on how to use it, just ask.

From what I've read on various sources, the C2 capabilities of the PX-708A are excellent. Personally, I believe Plextools is at least as secure as EAC. The only reason why I still mostly use EAC is because of the features (Plextools can't rip to CD image + CUE sheet), not because of the reliability.


Standard CD-ROM drive behaviour. You get faster speeds at the outer edges of the CD. EAC should also speed up while extracting, just maybe not as much as Plextools.

No good reason except that disk is cheap and WAV/AIFF is simple and ubiquitious. And iTunes will append ID3v2 tags to the end of AIFF files, so I can even store metadata with AIFF.

Also, it seems like most lossless algorithms can't do better than cut file size in half (usually not even), which isn't a benefit to me since I only have about 300 CD to rip. If I had a thousand, it would be a different story.

I don't think BFC (or any regular binary compare app) will work.

I extracted the same CD twice with PlexTools and computed MD5 checksums for files in both directories. They were different between the two extractions. However, when I used EAC to compare the WAV content, they were all identical. This leads me to believe that each extraction writes slightly different data to the header, or maybe there are some offset or silence differences that make simple binary compares fail.

I hope to find a command-line WAV compare tool so I don't have to use the EAC GUI for each file.

I have no idea why your md5's differ but I've just tested what I was saying above and it works:

EAC, secure mode, no C2, test and copy for both folders.



I expected the differing logs since I used different drives so the text contained within will differ.

You are right, of course. I don't know why I got MD5 differences before. I have since extracted a number of CDs twice and the WAV files match bit for bit.